· having more than one package is good practice
· get expertise in for specific tasks (as with usability)
· but also people need training in basics
· sharing apples/apples data with others can be useful

But I'm not convinced that many departments are consciously choosing other packages. Some have just been using the same tool for years, and haven't yet been shown a convincing reason to change. Some probably have bigger issues on their to-do lists. And some simply aren't measuring traffic systematically... or at all. For example: Transport admitted they couldn't offer a complete picture in a PQ answer last week.

I'm not saying Piwik is the best solution - maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I'm asking COI to think creatively around the issue of variable availability of data, and inconsistent measurement methods. A Piwik installation, plus a couple of lines of JavaScript on every HMG website would immediately tackle both those key issues.

But the broader point isn't one about availability or cost of tools, but about using data to evaluate effectiveness. What the guidance needs to do - and does to an extent, I think - is make the case for a data-driven, customer-focussed approach to delivering services and information online. That will vary by service and organisation, so the best approach would seem to be to have a suite of metrics and tools recommended, rather than prescribed.

One of the attractive features of consultation documents that are republished on WriteToReply are the paragraph and section level URIs that allow "remote comments" to associated with a particular part of a document. Using pingbacks/trackbacks, consultation organisers can keep track of who has been commenting elsewhere about a particular section of their document, if those commenters link back to the appropriate section of the report.

Seeing your string "..consider this as Puffbox Ltd's contribution to the consultation exercise. ..." it reminded me of the mechanism used by services such as Technorati and feedburner in which a publisher proves to the service that they own a particular website by inserting a unique identifying string/key provided by the service into a web page. The service detects the key in a page coming from a domain they expect, and so recognise the individual who obtained the key for that domain as the publisher of that site.

So... I wonder if there is an opportunity here for a service in which someone wanting to respond to a consultation could just include a particular string that identifies a web page as being a contribution to a particular consultation exercise. A web search for that string would then pull back all these contributions.

Of course, it might be that people running consultation exercises run web searches on key terms, and so capture informal responses in this way. But by adding a small cost/degree of friction "you must use this exact phrase for your response to count" then it's possible to start sorting deliberate, as opposed to by chance, public responses to a document.

This approach is still quite weak, though, and doesn't require much effort on part of the respondent to post a response.

So how about this: if the consultation wanted to run a more formal exercise, it could even offer a 'click use' [ http://www.opsi.gov.uk/click-use/ ]/"claim this response" service where a respondent embeds a unique string in the page that can be discovered by a web search engine and used to automatically pull in responses to a consultation by virtue of that string appearing in a page on a domain associated with that string. The pages with the appropriate string can then be treated as formal contributions to the consultation with no further effort required by the respondent?